Stat Board Chief: Call Centers and TV Rot Your Brain
Thanks to Issai for pointing out this wonderfully vitriolic article by Alex Villafania.
“It pains me to hear about many of our brilliant, young students dropping out of college to work in the call centers. Yes, the call centers where the money seems to be.”
This was the opening statement of National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) Secretary General Romulo Virola in his recent column called “Statistically Speaking” in NSCB’s website, pointing to what he calls a downtrend spiral of the country’s education system.
He also aimed his disappointment at Filipino’s fascination for “boom tarat tarat,” which ostensibly is a jingle used in a popular noontime TV show.
“Of course the call centers can help us attain the economic growth that we need to be able to reduce poverty. But is education no longer the asset that we of the older generation treasured? Isn’t there anything anyone can do to contain the fascination of our society for our children to become singers and dancers rather than scientists and engineers?” Virola stressed.
“But one conclusion is safe: in education, we used to be better than many of our neighbors and competitors! Not anymore, or at least not much longer! Time to wake up! Maybe time to shift entertainment from Boom Tarat Tarat to something else!”
Call it the Boom Tarat Tarat Manifesto. Dr. Virola and Lauro Vives should talk. Lauro says medical transcription sucks.
I have two bits of good news for Dr. Virola. First, Philippine IT is slowly shifting from BPO to netrepreneurship. Second, Philippine entertainment is already shifting from TV to YouTube. 🙂
Level Up Drops Splash Page and Autoplay Annoyance, Still No RSS
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that the homepage of top Philippine online game publisher Level Up featured an infantile splash page and annoying autoplaying video. I’m glad to see they’ve removed both.
Now, all they need are RSS feeds, and they’ll actually have a decent site. Who knows, if I see enough good stuff from them in my RSS reader, I might even plunk a few Xfire hours into RF Online (gasp!).
When they’ve put up those RSS feeds, they should try getting their own YouTube account. Their Christmas promo vid had to go through Hackenslash’s YouTube account — on New Year’s Day. Talk about being late to the party, and by proxy at that.
Level Up is a game publisher, not a Web publisher. Their Web content exists to promote their games, and promotional content works best when made viral. You don’t make content viral by portalizing it for stickiness. You make content viral by widgetizing it for syndication.
Here’s my challenge to Level Up: if you come up with at least one decent RSS feed for your site, I will post a nice little widget for it on this blog. My readers can take that widget and repost it on their blogs. That’s free viral marketing for you guys.
